Re: installing 32b debian on unused partition

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Ric Otte <ric@otte.ucsc.edu> writes:

> Hi,
>
> When I installed debian on my amd64 I didn't expect things to work very well,
> and so I made an extra 10g partition in which I could install a 32 bit kernel
> to use while I got pure64 working.  Surprisingly, the pure64 install went
> very easily and everything works (more things work than did on a previous
> i386 install).  But now I still have this unused extra 10g partition, and I
> figure I might as well install debian on it; that way I can compare the 32bit
> vs the 64bit performance.
>
> My current partition scheme (from /etc/fstab) is:
>     /dev/sda1       /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
>     /dev/sda4       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
>     /dev/sda6       /opt            ext3    defaults        0       2
>     /dev/sda10      /tmp            ext3    defaults        0       2
>     /dev/sda9       /usr            ext3    defaults        0       2
>     /dev/sda8       /usr/local      ext3    defaults        0       2
>     /dev/sda7       /var            ext3    defaults        0       2
>     /dev/sda5       none            swap    sw              0       0
> Since /dev/sda3 is the unused partition (formatted ext3), I would like to
> install debian on it.  I was hoping to use the same swap, tmp, and home
> partition.
>
> I was about to try to use the debian installer, when I came across
> 3.7 Installing Debian GNU/Linux from a Unix/Linux System at
> http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-preparing.en.html .

Hi,

a small bit of advice: If you've never done this before you might be
better of just using the installer.

It's quite a bit from a chroot to a fully bootable 32bit system and
you probably need many reboots to try&error out all the little
things. So unless you are intrested in doing this and not just the
result just use the installer.

That aside you can of cause reuse tmp and swap and home. Just make
sure you don't format home in the installer. If you decide to go via
(c)debootstrap then just create the mountpoints, mount the partitions
(--bind) and then run (c)debootstrap and create your fstab and users.

If you want to share /home the users in both systems must match so
create them in the right order or copy the entries over from one to
the other. The rest is straight forward.

MfG
        Goswin

PS: Why do you have a /tmp partition an not just a tmpfs (and an
acordingly larger swap)?